ABSTRACT
Discussion of increasing American anxiety about fear and risk would be incomplete without serious attention to a concomitant national delight in self-scaring, through watching frightening films and TV shows and participating in terror-inducing rides (with greater abandon than people in places like Great Britain; the nation led the world in death-defying amusement park attractions from the early twentieth century onward). The national propensity reached such proportions by the turn of the twenty-first century that movies might simply be entitled “Scary,” with the only justification a set of scenarios designed to cause chills; and one of the most touted of the “reality” TV series was called Fear Factor, though it seemed to deal as often with disgust, mainly around the consumption of worms, as with fear itself.
